Michael David Apted, CMG (born 10 February 1941) is an English director, producer, writer and actor. He is one of the most prolific British film directors of his generation, and directed the Up Series (1964–2012) of documentaries and the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough (1999).

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Early life[edit]

Apted was born to a middle-class family in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, the son of Frances Amelia (née Thomas) and Ronald William Apted,[2] who worked for an insurance company. Michael Apted secured a scholarship to attend City of London School and then to study law and history at Downing College, Cambridge.[2]

Family[edit]

Apted is divorced from his second wife, the screenwriter Dana Stevens, with whom he has a 12-year-old son, John. From his first marriage to Jo Apted he had two sons, Paul and Jim. Paul Apted was a sound editor who worked on movies such as The Wolverine, and died on 4 July 2014 from colon cancer.[3] In 2007 Apted become a father for the fourth time to a girl, Lily Mellis, who lives with her mother Tania Mellis in California.

Career[edit]

Television[edit]

He began his career in television as a six-months trainee at Granada Television in Manchester, where he worked as a researcher. One of his first projects at Granada would become his best known: the Up Series, which began in 1964 as a profile of fourteen seven-year-old children for the current affairs series World In Action. As a researcher and assistant to Canadian director Paul Almond, Apted was involved in selecting the children. Though it began as a one-shot documentary, the series has become an institution, revisiting the subjects every seven years, with Apted directing the later episodes in the series. It follows Apted's thesis that the British class system remains largely in place, and is premised on the Jesuit motto "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." The series looks at the lives of this sample of British people over the years; the latest instalment, 56 Up, was produced in 2012. It won a Peabody Award in 2012 "for its creator’s patience and its subjects’ humanity."[4]

Michael Apted used his idea from the Up Series a second time in Married in America and Married in America 2. The idea is to explore a subject and then return to the subject in a subsequent film to tell a more complete story.

For his work in television, Apted has won several British Academy Awards, including one for Best Dramatic Director.

In 1979 he directed the Hollywood-financed Agatha, featuring Vanessa Redgrave.[6] The majority of Apted's feature films since then have been based around a female protagonist. He went to the United States in 1980, where he directed Coal Miner's Daughter, which received seven Academy Award nominations, winning best actress for Sissy Spacek. Both Spacek and Loretta Lynn, the subject of the film, have said that they believe Apted's outsider point of view was crucial to the movie's success in securing the participation of Appalachian residents and to the avoidance of stereotypes that previously had marred portrayals of mountain culture.[7][8]Sigourney Weaver and Jodie Foster have also earned Academy Award nominations for their work in Apted-directed films.

In a departure from his earlier work, from 1992 to 1994, Apted ventured into China's rapidly changing popular culture. In a project backed by Trudie Styler, Apted directed Moving the Mountain, a feature documentary which probed the origins of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square and the consequences of the movement in the lives of several of the movement's student leaders.